Five Star Friday's 170th Edition Is Brought to You By Angela D Of Fluid Pudding

This week's Five Star Friday is brought to you by rehab, reading with a daughter, dad blogging, an unnecessarily traumatic trip to the doctor, airline security in Iceland, fiction, the love of a good dog, psychological imbalance, a poem, flattery, a helpful list for writers, and, quite unbeknownst to her at the time of this writing, Angela D of

It was February of 2004. It rained non-stop that month. I was glad. I wanted my outside to look as depressing as my insides felt. The place was mostly populated by Prop 36 inmates. They had been offered the choice between prison and rehab. This was the easier softer way, but they gave the joint a certain jail vibe. In fact, Boris was grinding down a toothbrush into a shiv on a brick he had found when I moved into my room. "I would use the brick first," I said, "and keep the dental hygiene as back up." He laughed. We introduced ourselves.

When I witnessed your distant and considerate face, I wanted to beg you to never forget the way a still image begins to wiggle and jostle and spill into its past and future. You guessed what might happen. I said maybe; we'll see. We wondered past the edge of each turning page, bridging the Cartesian gap between body and mind with the smear of imagination.

I am a sad fucking case and I am an absolute rock star on my best day. I don't know how else to describe it, except to say that as self-aware as I have prided myself on being, the past year has been mostly an exercise in denial and fear and self-loathing. And once it killed or tried to the two things that I love the most that is when I woke up, to a place so lonely it shone, to a silence I hadn't known in a very, very long time, and yet could identify from one of the saddest spaces in my history.

Your eye, it wanders. To the curves and supple milk-flesh of another story. Cheater. Cheater. Stop that crap right now. You go too far down that path before long you will wander away from your current WIP and into the arms of another — and once that happens, you may find that you’ll never go back. You adulterous ink-slut, you. With a pair of another story’s panties sticking out of your pocket. For shame. For shame.